Category Archives: Election 2012

Middle of the Road Rage

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Here’s an interesting nugget in a comment, addressed to me, from the post on John W. Smart’s blog that I was discussing yesterday:

…Hillary lost because of documented, widespread caucus fraud, bribing of superdelegates, and the theft of her delegates on national TV (which I and many others watched live). She won the primaries, but they pulled him an inch over the finish line through the cheating. So our disgruntlement is about far more than Hillary. For many (most?) of us, the democrats were “the good guys”. What you obamabots did was to awaken us from our stupor, you allowed us to see how corrupt the obamacrat party really is. So for many of us our whole political philosophies have changed. We no longer trust the dems more than we trust the republicans, and we know now that there are a HELL of a lot of stupid and mob-like people out there who don’t have a CLUE what real democracy means. To them, it’s win at any cost. So your obot tactics burned a LOT of bridges. It may have been just one more day of cheating for you guys, but it was a life changing tsunami for everyone else. Many have changed to independent, some are still registered as Democrat but no longer consider themselves as such. So any numbers you think you have – you DON’T.

I’m not going to answer this person on Smart’s blog as I know my presence there this morning would be counterproductive to the purposes of dialog. He or she said some other things that are unhelpfully provocative boilerplate from the primary wars of 2008, and as everything that could possibly be said in those wars has already been said a thousand times over, there’s really nothing more anyone can add to it that isn’t also boilerplate or counterproductive to reasonable discussion. I’m really, really not interested in the “Who’s better/more progressive/more electable/ more presidential: Hillary or Barack?” debate. From my perspective, this is irrelevant to present realities, no matter how endlessly fascinating the question may be for some. It honestly never was a useful discussion for any leftist, ever, even while it was was relevant.

But it is eye-opening to experience the violence of feeling ready to erupt among the Clinton refugees and, I tip my hat to them, sincerely: it does make me realize that I, like probably every former Obama supporter, no matter how hot or cold they were for their choice, had blinders on during those primaries. Continue reading →

Liberals Fear #OWS, Part Deux

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I posted earlier about The New Republic’s “skepticism” toward #occupyWallStreet. There’s another fascinating display of liberal OWS bashing going on here. I was drawn to it, while perusing the OWS posts on WordPress a couple of days ago, by its provocative title: “Failure.” “FAILURE.” [Shouting CAPS in the original.] In it, the author, John W. Smart (if that’s his real name), gloats  about the impending doom of #OccupyLA’s encampment at City Hall (which I watched part of last night on ustream) before snarkily giving it his thumbs down:

Many Occupiers are busy congratulating themselves for their “accomplishment” – another perfect demonstration of pathetic public education system they emerged from. Everybody gets a sticker for showing up. Everyone’s ‘self worth’ is feted with a bull horn and a cookie. The concept of real accomplishment is utterly foreign, in fact, it is dangerous. The true “others” in this nether world are those who get things done. They must be fought.

In terms of ‘getting things done’ Occupy is an abject failure. 3 months in and not a single major bank as been shut down…or is even in fear of failure. No enabler in Congress is remotely concerned about his/her job. The middle class, who took it up the south side and continues to with the bailouts, is completely disinterested, if not disgusted. The sympathetic press – such as it is – has moved on, alighting only for the occasional graphic clip of pepper spraying or baton beating. What Occupy wanted at the outset (still a muddled question) has not come to pass, nor is any tangible action moving in that direction.

Still what one might call a success – if one is generous – did occur. There is a slightly greater consciousness of how rigged our system is. This is not nothing, though to my thinking it’s close. The population understood the system was rigged before Occupy showed up. Occupy did show us that some people are willing to do some thing about the appalling racket we call an economy. I give the protesters credit for this. Unless the encampments were merely a prelude and  Occupy morphs into a vital, muscular movement – and quickly – I must call it like I see it: Occupy is a failure.

Let’s first note that Occupy as a viable force is two months old. I think it’s premature to expect any movement to outright “succeed,” however one defines success, but it’s certainly premature, not to say churlish, to conclude that something that is barely aborning is a failure. It’s this injustice in the remark that provoked me to plunge in with a comment in defense of OWS. Continue reading →

#OWS and #TeaParty: Is a Meeting of Minds Possible?

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Mid-South Tea Party member Jan Allen stands in front of the sign-in desk at a meeting where two Occupy Memphis members were speaking, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011, in Bartlett, Tenn. (AP Photo/Adrian Sainz)

Van Jones tweeted a link to this blog post, which links to a news item about a meeting between #occupyMemphis and Mid-South Tea Party members,  which he apparently took to be a good sign. I share Jones’s optimism about the enormous potential for positive change in the search for common ground between these two movements. From the quotes in the news item, it’s clear that Jones and I are not alone Continue reading →

#TeaParty Rep. Loses Cool with Skeptical Constituents

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Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois demonstrates his concept of representative democracy at a townhall held in a bar in his district last weekend. What exercised the Congressman’s patience was the suggestion, apparently popular among the unrattled attendees, that, as I suggested yesterday,  private banks were as much at fault for the depressed or recessed economy as politicians. Walsh displays the Tea Party mindset at its most rigid worst when he asserts that consistency of ideology is more important than accuracy of fact. He doesn’t want the people of his district to forget is that he will not stray from the Tea Party (Republican) line that  private interests are more important than the public interest.

The bottom line: The people get it. Some politicians don’t and don’t want to get it.

PS: Perhaps the most astonishing moment of this video is when Walsh says, “”What has made this mess is your government­, which has demanded for many years that everybody be in a home.” Is a Tea Party Republican actually blaming the American dream of universal home ownership for the economic mess? Is he really suggesting that the American dream is the product of government rather than of individuals? Setting aside the question of whether or not this is right, this seems to be a startling position for a conservative, pro-market, pro-individualist to be taking. I wonder if this will be a new shade of conservatism: anti-American Dream libertarianism.

 

Defending #OWS, Ron Paul Says He Supports Bailout of People with Bad Mortgages

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I applaud him for that. He is certainly the rare politician who seems to actually understand the legitimacy of the #occupyWallStreet protest.

Of course, the last time I heard applause for him like this at one of these debates, he was arguing against bailing out people with catastrophic illnesses who have no health insurance.

Jeffrey Sachs Supports #OccupyWallStreet

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This is what democracy looks like when it works: media dialoguing with a rational person telling the truth about what’s wrong and what needs to change:

This is just over 22 minutes, but it’s 22 minutes well spent.

Info from the YouTube video on Sachs:

Watch Jeffrey Sachs, leading environmentalist and economist, and a respected Professor at Columbia University, speak out at the growing, inspiring Occupy Wall Street movement. Sachs is one of many professors, celebrities, community leaders, spiritual leaders and public figures who are speaking out in support of the OWS movement and what it stands for.

Disunite the States of America?

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They could have everything south of the 40th parallel between the 100th and 80th latitude. And Alaska.

Eric Alterman in his Nation column this week sighs over the stupidity rampant among high-power journalists–he names Meet the Press‘s David Gregory, for one–that makes them bend over backwards to be “balanced” in their coverage of left and right. It’s a “balance” that actually lends undue gravity to right-wing idiocy. Recently, Alterman says, Gregory equated the left’s alarm over Rick Perry’s secessionist noises with the right’s over “socialist” health care reform as examples of what Gregory implied was understandable outrage over the other side’s extremism. As Alterman puts it, “To treat the potential destruction of the United States via the secession of its second most populous state and the provision of affordable healthcare to its citizens with privately provided health insurance as somehow morally and intellectually equivalent—well, ‘stupidity’ is actually too kind a word.” I couldn’t agree more.

And yet, I was reminded while reading Alterman’s essay of an idea that began to make tremendous sense to me a few weeks ago when the president delivered his jobs speech to the joint session–or actually just after, when the pundits immediately agreed that, no matter how powerful Obama’s words were, they were almost certainly all wasted, if action and not just reelection really was what was motivating him. Continue reading →

Ron Paul Reveals More About His Notion of Freedom

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The most notorious moment in the Republican presidential debate the other night revealed something about Ron Paul the “liberty” candidate’s idea of what freedom actually means to him. Clearly some vociferous audience members, presumably members of the Tea Party, think they define it similarly, but I don’t think all Americans do or would. Continue reading →

A Country Doctor Diagnoses What’s Wrong with Obama

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And offers a prescription for real change we can believe in.

There used to be a lot more of this wisdom among grass roots activists in America. I like the ideas of Dr. Joe Mason. You like them? You can write to him here.

Fox News is Afraid of Ron Paul

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As much as I criticize Dr. Libertarian from Texas, I do find Fox’s GOP-sanctioned fear of him, as pointed out by Cenk Uygur of the The Young Turks in the video below, to be utterly pathetic.

As davejoe75 says in the comments to the YouTube video: “Cenk nailed it with that last comment…O’Reilly wants the Ron Paul bump!”